I've been meaning to write this for some time, and for all the time I delayed the more poignant the point I wanted to make started to become as new news came out further solidifying my angle. When I begun writing this article the iPad had not yet been revealed, iPhone OS 4 was not on the map and Apple had not yet purchased Lala. You've probably just noticed that all of these events in fact point toward Apple embracing the web more and in this article I will point out why this is not the case because I believe Apple's agenda here is similar to something we've already seen in recent history.

Most of those have average to poor performance and take ages to load. I've used Maple for years, then tried Mathematica, and it feels incredibly faster and snappier in most cases. Mathematica's interface for formatting is arguably better too, but it may be due more to the developers than to the GUI toolkit being used.

Same for Vuze vs KTorrent or µTorrent. Again, performance loss is huge, especially on the interface snapiness area.

Same for matlab. Until it gets usable, on an average computer, I usually have more than enough time to make and drink two cups of coffee...

Admittedly I haven't used Vuze recently since uTorrent is much closer to what I need, but back when I used Azureus it had a snappy UI regardless of the PC. Possibly Vuze's flashy chrome makes it slower, but I doubt it's much slower than a native app that uses similarly flashy chrome.

As for startup time, I already admitted that that is an issue. However, it's an issue that the last year or so of Java updates have addressed, and which is still being improved upon. Also note that this is primarily an issue the first time the JVM starts up, though it's possible that for IDEs this doesn't apply since they often use private VMs.